Community, unity and diversity!… is Jonzi D’s rallying holler to the auditorium of hip-hop family packing-out Breakin’ Convention Festival at Sadlers Wells this year.
I say family—the huddles of young and old around me are surely the most diverse theatre audience I’ve experienced—and this isn’t solely due to the healthy representation of global majority hip-hop fans of varying ages and cultures. I would place bets on some of these families being rather posh and some having made the trip as a rare excursion to London.
This is the stuff of audience-development dreams, rounded-off by unself-conscious whoops, cries, comments and riffs of engagement throughout. The effect is a democratic arena of Shakespearean qualities. I feel slightly envious of the sense of belonging, as this is clearly one bear-pit of the arts where subtle demonstrations of status and snobbery would quickly be faced-off with the kind of physical mimicry only a hip-hop artist could pull-off.
Like most people raised by a girl’s school in Lincolnshire, my experience of hip-hop has been of something marginal, floating through car radios from 1990s America. So, for me, like some others, Breakin’ Convention constitutes an evening’s education. The first thing that strikes me is the machismo of the storytelling.
From South Korea’s Jinjo Crew to the UK’s When Time was New, DHW UK, Create4 and Boy Blue, the male presence is encompassing and disproportionate. It’s important to recognise the authenticity in this, though, as a continuation of the street-dance and rap culture evolved by young men expressing the highs and lows of the macho, urban experience.
I say macho—the drama of challenge and suffering present in When Time was New’s Psyche and Create4’s Hereditory is rooted in traditional images of the male, urban melodrama—struggles with the law, incarceration and mental prisons constructed by egos struggling with the quest for respect. Ironically, both are interrogations of toxic masculinity. Performance poetry in Psyche echoes these concerns without heavy editing or censorship.
Light plays an important role throughout this festival, in drawing the outlines of how these artists are contained or set free and, on occasion, highlights a background of Christian black culture in the shape of crucifixes. The results are elevated stories of working-class male life, edified in music, light, motion and symbolism.
It was encouraging, then, to see women fill the stage with progressive dominance throughout the evening, not only in the sexually liberated hip-hop noir of Los Angeles based Femme Fatale, but in the extremely slick isolations, popping and breaking of Boy Blue’s femme members. The latter’s sheer number of dancers and penchant for contemporary classical music makes the company stand out as the more developed OG of the community.
The most politically overt and punchy work of the evening was an athletic meditation on the plight of Palestine by Sasha Mahfouz Shadid, a British Palestinian Artist born in Southsea. Although the storytelling of this piece was at times indecipherable because of its sheer energy and rage, its message of outrage and pain was acute.
Breakin’ Convention parts ways with its audience via a trance-like celebration of nineteen-nineties hip-hop of the house-party variety courtesy of Sons of Wind’s Bounce, a cumulative wave of flow and physical theatre reminiscent of scenes from teen movies of the era—the ones I wasn’t allowed to watch.
While the provenance and pieces of hip-hop culture will be foreign to some, the sentiment of enacting life lived around and through the structures that seek to control it remains the same for all. Community, Unity and Diversity thrive at festivals like this, and they should head for the regions… including Lincolnshire!